Ehlers explains how
in the middle of the 20th century, conservative critics decried experimental verse forms in an attempt to destroy the modernist avant-garde and to undo its associations with the Left. Yet by treating modern poetic experimentalism as a form of communist subversion, and by privileging a traditional lyricism defined by individual expression and reflection, it appears that these critics effectively convinced American audiences that poetry and politics don't mix.The anti-communist critics, such as Stanley Coblentz's League for Sanity in Poetry, attempted to remove the politics from earlier poets. They rewrote the history of poetry to their own ends, turning Whitman from a radical socialist (and homsexual) into a nationalist, an epic poet to match Virgil or de Camoes, and used attacks on poetical experimentalism to discredit the political views of the largely left-wing experimental poets of the 1920s and 30s.
The anti-communists focussed on the difficulty and non-accessibility of modernist poetry, using its apparent rejection of the mass audience to discredit it: modernist poetry became an enemy of the public. The conservatives feared modernist poetry's rejection of hierarchy, with Donald Davidson condemning paratactic verse for its "treacherous political irresponsibility in the act of eschewing relations of cause and effect while the related elements [are] left to stand in unordered, unsubordinated lists." (AF) Bernstein points out the contradiction that leftist writers were often seen as democratic, yet in the 1950s left-wing modernist forms were accused of elitism and anti-populism.
Traditional lyric poetry was seen as staying true to individual emotions, while modern verse was about abstractions. The 1950s anticommunists used similar language to that of Hitler's art criticism: "The vocabulary of thirties-bashing was cast in the idiom of incurability; tropes of cancer and mass death abounded. Leftist writing of the 1930s was dismissed 'in a phrase: it was an alien growth' ... 'poison'" (AF). Lucien Burman condemned Gertrude Stein's influence "still to be found in many strategic strongholds, like the lurking germs of a yellow fever, they must be constantly fought and sprayed with violent chemicals lest the microbes develop again and start a new infection."
As the conservatives tried to shape poetry to their will, modernists were accused of imposing critical orthodoxy and perpetrating a "Big Lie": the lie that their work was poetry at all. Coblentz claimed modernist leftists would use the state security apparatus to impose their poetic ideas on the nation. Pinnacle, the magazine of the League for Sanity in Poetry, compared modernism to genocide. Peter Viereck linked the modernist "anything goes" philosophy with totalitarian mass murder.
The effects of this conservative campaign were long-lasting. 1950s magazines like Poetry refused to publish new verse by writers with radical politics even if the poets had been previously published there. Many poets saw their reputations ruined. The critical landscape shifted from the radicalism of the early 20th century to the system we now have. Bernstein sees traces of the anti-modernism persisting, in a belief that mainstream aesthetic principles are common sense, and a continuing pressure towards non-ideological poetry that accepts the dominant norms; the literary establishment claims that the avant-garde has won, as an excuse to say experimentalism's time has past.
It is common on the left to explain post-ideological traditionalist poetry and literature as an inevitable product of late capitalism, but the account given by Filreis seem to show that contemporary ideas about poetry were creations of people with a specific political program and perhaps not historically necessary. It also shows how decisions about the literary canon often reflect political needs; battles over the interpretation of classic poets are frequent, and it can be seen here that they often have very high stakes.
Filreis's work follows earlier studies such as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders (Reviews Monthly Review; CIA) which described how the CIA and other anti-communist organisations funded journals such as the Partisan Review, promoted writers such as George Orwell, and most famously supported abstract expressionism. The influence of these policies is debatable; while some people claim abstract expressionism was otherwise worthless and its valorisation is all a CIA plot, a more measured response sees the CIA as attempting to shift the world's cultural balance from Europe (with its strong left-wing tendencies) towards the USA. Promoting abstract art also damaged the left-wing representational art that had been popular in public contexts in the 1930s and 40s, funded by New Deal money, with the many followers of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and black artists like Jacob Lawrence. And art is not a matter of isolated geniuses: they require money, often from government or institutional sources (most American poets seem to earn their living through universities), but also a supportive creative and critical community.
There was certainly debate in the 1950s as to whether anti-communists should fund the abstract expressionists or more traditional artists, so it's noteworthy that in poetry the opposite side seemed to win compared to what happened in painting. And now we have an art world dominated by abstraction and conceptualism, and a literary world that seems shy of experiment. Cultural history often seems to conservatives to be a history of great men and women, and to those on the left as a story of historical inevitability under the wheels of capitalism, but Filreis shows that neither view is sufficient, and literary reputations and the success of artistic movements often hinge on political expediency and decisions that have little to do with art.
